don't sell no alibi
by isawet
Summary: After Malia, Kono takes Chin on a roadtrip-or the metaphorical equivalent when you live on an island you can drive around in less than four hours. Teamfic.


Kono has a magic trick that is more magic than trick.

She knows what time it is, always, without needing to look at a watch or a clock or even the sun. It's a running joke between her and Danny; he likes to quiz her on stakeouts. Steve, who breaks his watches doing ridiculous stunts almost as fast as he can buy new ones, always frees the new one out of the packaging and tosses it to her to set before buckling it around his wrist.

/

Kono bolts upright in the hospital after they fish her out of the ocean and cut her free of the chair and gasps, her heart going so hard the monitor at the bedside goes off in a cacophony of alarms. "Ssshh," Danny says frantically, "shit, rookie-" He moves to the side as a doctor rushes in and does something to her IV.

"What time is it," she rasps, panicking, and Danny jerks in surprise. "Danny," she gasps, her heartbeat rising again, and the doctor says something that gets garbled between his mouth and her ears. Danny pulls the watch off his wrist and presses it into her hands-it's an old fashioned analog face on a worn leather strip band, and she clenches her fingers around it until she can feel the second hand tick against the inside of her knuckles. It calms her enough to realize what is really wrong with her hospital room.

"Where's Chin?" she asks, and Danny flinches.

/

The funeral is on a Sunday. Kono wears her hair straight and serious, a plain black dress with three quarter sleeves. Adam is gone on a business trip; he texts her when his plane takes off and lands. Sweat gathers in the small of her back and across her collarbones during the church service and dries outside in the cemetery when it rains, a light shower that cools the air and rattles off the muted umbrellas provided by the undertaker. She stands with her parents and her aunts and her uncles and their children. Chin stands unmoving next to Malia's family, and the disconnect is so strong halfway through Kono moves to slip between Danny and Steve, who slide apart and then back around her natural like breathing. Steve gives her a strained half-smile, Danny's arm brushes the small of her back-that feels better, feels more right. She looks at the grass brushing her sandals so she won't have to look at the curved lid of the coffin and remember Malia's waxy face on starched linen lining.

The wake is held at Kono's parent's house because of the large expanse of their backyard. All family functions are held there, ever since Kono can remember, pieces of canvas stretched out across collapsible plastic poles to provide shade and a chop suey of mismatched folding tables for food and sweating cans of soda. The children too young to know what's happened run winding through the lines and groups of people, shrieking to each other and catching geckos in the weeds grown long by the fences.

Kono kicks off her shoes and leaves them in a heap by the sliding door. She fishes twin beers from her father's stash and finds Steve and Danny leaned against a wall, apart from the general crowd and looking tense. They smile when she offers them the bottles, and Steve pops the caps off with a trick that utilizes his back teeth as Danny pulls faces and grumbles about degrading enamel.

"You've got-" Steve says, and tugs a leaf from her hair.

"Hey," she says, "I was saving that for later." The joke falls painfully flat, but they smile at her anyway.

"Chin went in a few minutes ago," Danny says. "We were talking about going in after him, but..." he trails off and Kono takes a deep breath, squares her shoulders.

"I got it," she says, and lets muscle memory take over, across the linoleum of the kitchen to the scarred hard wood of the hallway, all the way down to the chipped wooden door of her old room, still kept decorated with the pastel wall stencils of waves and surfboards, the _kapu_ sign hanging crooked at head-height as she steps onto faded shag carpet.

Chin is sitting on her bed with his back against the headboard, his ankles crossed on her checkered bedspread. He's holding a picture frame in his hands. Kono clucks at him. "Shoes on the bed," she says in her (spot-on) imitation of Chin's mother, and he tries a smile at her. She winces and he grimaces in response.

"That bad?"

Kono crosses the room to swing her legs up beside his. "Not good, cousin." Chin tilts the frame in his hands until the glare eases off the glass and she can see the snapshot printed on cheap photo paper: Kono at sixteen with dried-white sand stuck across her bikini top, tucked under Chin's arm, pulling at the woven tea-lei draped across his neck. Pressed against his other side is Malia, her face screwed up into the sun and Chin's lips pressed sloppily against her temple. Before the scandal, before her knee, before the breakup.

"I should have let her go the first time," he says. Kono doesn't have a way to make this better so she stays quiet as his thumb brushes across Malia's smiling face. "She would have been happier."

"Not so," Kono murmurs, and continues before he can argue, "you know she would not have agreed."

Chin's knuckles go white. "She would be alive to disagree."

"Her life her decision," Kono replies sharply, "don't dishonour her choices when she's not here to defend them." She doubts that sentence has soothed the wounds of Malia's loss, but some of the stiffness eases from Chin's body, and she hopes that some of it got through the haze of guilt and sorrow.

"I should go," Chin says finally.

"No one will judge you for not hosting," Kono says, which isn't true. "You deserve the right to grieve," she says, which is true.

"My responsibility," Chin says softly, and lays the photo facedown on the bedside table with careful hands, reverent. Kono gropes for something to say to make it better, but she can't find words fast enough and he leaves, his dress shoes clicking down the hallway.

Kono reaches out and uses the hem of her dress to polish the glass of the picture, wipes the smudges from the metal frame, and sets it so their three smiling faces, unlined and uncreased, not a care in the world, rest in a sunbeam streaming through the window. She remembers Malia cheering for her at surfing competitions, the way Chin's face lit up when they slow danced, how he dragged her out to look at rings for hours before he chose. The mattress creaks as she stands.

"_E ho'omaha me ka maluhia,_ Malia," she murmurs, and closes the bedroom door firmly behind her.

/

Kono keeps a list running in her head, just behind worrying about Steve's mom and above how Adam's business trips keep increasing. The list doesn't get added to every day, but it grows steady-stronger like the underpull of a riptide, until it keeps her up at night, dark bags puffing under her eyes.

Steve catches her slumped in the locker room with her elbows dangling between her legs, taking deep breaths after Chin went after a suspect before radioing in and came back with six stitches across his forearm from a rusty machete.

"Hey," Steve says, and Kono rubs at her eyes.

"Hey boss," she rasps, and stands like an old woman, her back creaking. "You need the room?"

"No," he says, and closes the door behind him, leans against it. Kono tenses, brings her chin up defiantly, and he makes a calming gesture at her.

"It's okay," he says, "I want to talk to you about Chin." Kono tenses further, and Steve scrubs a hand through his hair. "Lemme start over," he says carefully, and hunches his shoulders down almost submissively. "He's taking risks he wasn't taking before."

Kono resists the urge to curl her lip up and show her teeth. "He doesn't take half the risks you take." Steve opens his mouth as if to argue and Kono's temper flares hot. "If you don't believe it Danny's got a list he can recite from memory." Her fists clench tight by her sides.

"_Malu,_," Steve says quickly, appeasingly. He crosses to her quickly and presses their foreheads together-the sudden intimacy shocks her into stillness, silence. They've been having a heatwave, even for Honolulu, and she can smell his deodorant, the air freshener Danny replaces weekly in the car. "_Maluhia,_" he says, and his breath blows lightly over her cheek. "I'm worried, not critical."

"I don't," Kono says, and her voice cracks. Steve brushes a thumb under her eyes and then steps back, giving them both space to pull their armour back up.

"It's Friday," Steve says, turning to look at the calendar taped to the wall even though they both know what day it is. "Take the weekend. Get Chin to take the weekend. _Ohana_ knows best."

"Five-0 is _ohana_," Kono says firmly, and straightens her spine. She wipes harshly at the tears in her eyes. Steve grins at her out of the corner of his mouth, still looking at the door.

"Truth," he agrees, "but you've been there longer."

"Truth," Kono echoes, and lets him hold the door for her.

/

Kono is stretched out on an ugly lawnchair on Chin's front step when he comes out at five in the morning, and he stutters for half a step before recovering his stride. Kono frowns-the lights had been on since she arrived at four, and she'd thought he'd known she was there.

"Kono," he says, lightly chiding, "do you need a ride to work?"

Kono lifts her bug-eyed sunglasses off her eyes and uses them to hold back her hair, She stretches the long line of her body out into full tenseness and then relaxes. She holds up a hand to tick off fingers. "Danny has Grace, Steve is meeting up with Catherine, Max is... spelunking."

"Paperwork waits for no one," he says patiently, and Kono throws him a look.

"Cousin please," she says, and he sighs-then frowns in a slightly different way.

"Isn't this when you'd usually be catching waves?" he asks, and Kono smoothes her expression out.

"This is a kidnapping," she says like he hasn't spoken, and spins the keys to her beat up two door Volvo around one finger.

"Your breaks are shit," he says, and Kono knows it's agreement.

"I'm driving," she says, and it's a testament of how worn down and worn out he really is that he passes her the keys and gets into the passenger side door of his car without another word.

/

Kono winds them up the coast, driving Aloha-style slow so Chin can watch the sun glint off the brilliant Pacific blue water on one side and the cragged rolling green mountains of Oahu on the other. She drags out the drive to Kahana to almost three and a half hours, cruising on Kamehameha like a tourist. She finds a clustered clump of food trucks just off a public bit of beach and parallel parks the car on a sidestreet. Her bumper kisses the SUV in front of them and Chin grumbles at her. She sticks her tongue out at him and rummages in the coin tray for quarters to feed the meter.

Next to the Mexican taco truck there's a rough tent erected streaming thick barbeque smoke. Kono takes a deep breath of oily air and smiles. Chin is hesitating by the car, looking like he's trying to decide if he should climb back in and fill out incident report forms. Kono tucks the car keys into her pocket and crosses the street decisively-she's juggling two boxes of huli huli chicken when he appears by her side to take the cartons of rice.

"I forgot to pack a blanket," Kono says as they walk down to the beach, and Chin grunts, changes their trajectory until they come to a piece of driftwood big enough to sit on, food balanced precariously on their knees. Kono blows sand from the roasted skin and eats with her hands, scooping up rice to chase bites of slippery chicken. Chin picks at his food, shredding more than he eats, but it's still more going into his mouth than she's seen in days, so she sucks on the bones and the grease on her fingers until he closes his styrofoam container and stands.

They wash their hands in the surf, and Chin retreats quickly, walking back up the beach and throwing their trash into a designated barrel. He lingers by the road for a moment, but when Kono stays in the shallows, submerged to her knees and lets wet sand weigh her feet down, he comes back, sitting high up and sunning himself.

Kono bends until droplets of water wet her shorts and lets the ocean spray dampen her face. She takes a deep breath and dips just the surface of her face beneath the surface, lasts almost thirty seconds before she rears back, gasping, panic risen high in her throat. She turns quickly, almost falling, to check if Chin has seen, but he's reclined back beneath an abandoned beach umbrella, his eyes closed. Kono makes her way to his side, walking slow to give herself time to regulate her breathing, and he moves over to give her room to share the shade.

They fall asleep like that, stretched out, turned into each other to protect their faces from the windblown sand.

/

Kono dreams of drowning, that one second gasp of air as they tipped her over the side, her wrists screaming from her attempts to free them from the chair, and how the water, always her sanctuary, suddenly became a prison.

She wakes with a gasp, Chin's hand on her shoulder. The sun has dipped half below the horizon, and she can feel sunburn on her arm and shoulder, the back of her neck.

"You were struggling," Chin says neutrally. "Nightmare?"

"I don't remember," Kono lies, and sits up. She stretches. Chin reaches out to brush the sand from her face and she lets him, his fingertips dusty white. "Lobster," she teases to distract him, and he twists his face at her. "What time is it?" she asks, still muzzy, and realizes her mistake as Chin goes utterly still. She suddenly becomes interested in picking the sand off the inside of her knee, grain by grain.

"Let's get aloe before we head back," he says finally, and Kono makes a humming agreement noise.

She drives to a Motel 6 instead, turning up the radio when he grumbles, and she takes the keys with her when she goes to book a room.

The AC is cranked to roaring when she shoves the door in, and she shivers. Chin crosses to the thermostat and turns it low before retreating to the bathroom with the bottle of aloe and a towel off the stack on the desk. The shower pipes squeal to life and Kono flops on the bed, intending to flick the crappy television to life, but the remote is too far and she yawns, curling into the pillows.

/

Kono wakes screaming, the real, truly terrified kind that comes out in harsh rasping gasps, her heart thundering in her ears. The door to the bathroom opens and Chin comes out in board shorts, shirtless, toweling his head off with one hand. He catches sight of her arched up in panic and the towel drops to the floor. He crosses to her side in three steps and presses his palm to her diaphragm.

"Breathe," he murmurs, but Kono _can't_, she can't and her vision is narrowing on the edges but Chin bends until his lips are brushing the curve of her ear. "You can, cousin. In and out." He drags his palms up her sides and then leans further so they're pressed torso to torso on their sides. It should feel crushing and crowding and too close but it doesn't, she feels the inhale-exhale of Chin's ribcage and he does it, over and over, breathes and breathes and breathes until Kono's chest starts to rise and fall with his and her fingers stop shaking, clenched around Chin's biceps.

"I'm okay," she says, and it's almost true. "I'm okay," she repeats after another minute of deep breathing, and it's much closer to being true. Chin stands to bring her a glass of water and she props herself up to take it. He sits across from her on the other bed and looks down at his hands.

"Kono..."

"I'm okay," she mutters, drawing up her legs and wrapping her arms around them. She bites her lip. Someone in the room next to them is watching television, the blare muted by the wall but still audible. The air conditioner clicks off and the quiet grows.

"Come on," Chin says abruptly, and stands, stepping into his shoes. He gestures at her impatiently until she does likewise. He grabs the key and hustles them out the door. The air is pleasantly cool but Kono shivers, the sweat from her dream drying. Chin walks close enough to her that their shoulders bump.

After a few minutes he breaks the silence. "I don't want you to think I wouldn't pick you," he says.

Kono tangles their fingers together. "It was the right choice," she says.

Chin frowns. "It may have been the lesser evil," he says, "but it wasn't right."

They arrive at a stretch of beach and stumble down to the water. Chin leaves the room key tucked into their pile of flip-flops and pulls her down into the surf, lapping gentle at the shore. Kono goes willingly until the water hits her thighs, and then she balks. Chin turns until he's facing her, his back to the ocean, and pulls her forward, step by step.

"I've got you," he says steadily, and they go until the water rolls around their waists. He steps to apply pressure on the small of her back and before she can panic they're floating on their backs, hands linked to stay together, looking up at the stars. The ocean is meek tonight, Kono thinks, and it rocks them gently with little swells. "I love you, cousin," Chin says.

Kono closes her eyes and lets herself fall into the movement of the waves, over and over, until she feels like she's sunk down into the tides themselves, Chin's hand tight in hers. After some amount of time she opens her eyes and turns to see Chin looking at her, quiet. "It's almost midnight," she whispers, and he smiles a smile that crinkles the corners of his eyes.

"Yes," he says, and they swim back to shore in effortless synchronized tandem.

/

Kono wakes early the next morning and ducks out to the ABC store on the corner, pays too much for a plastic box in the fridge by the counter. When she comes back Chin is still sleeping, a peaceful stillness wrapped around him. Kono jumps on the mattress beside him and bounces until he groans and swats blindly at her.

"Chin," she says impatiently, and drags him out the door as he grouses at her, squinting into the early morning light.

They trot onto the beach and Kono pulls the lei out of the plastic box, tossing the wrapper into a nearby trashcan. She drapes it over their hands and they wade into the ocean. Kono breathes with her mouth open to catch the salt spray on her tongue. When they're far enough in that the waves will catch the lei and take it out, they stop. Chin bows his head and murmurs something too quick and low for Kono to catch. Kono takes a second and thinks about the kindness in Malia, how she lived to heal people, how she helped to heal Chin, the dimple in her cheek.

They release the string of flowers into the waves and watch it come a little closer, then much farther away, over and over, steadily into the distance. "_E ho'omaha me ka maluhia_," Kono says, and Chin murmurs an echo.

/

She drives back in a more or less straight line, the windows cranked down to let the breeze in and cussing at the slow drivers in the left lane as Chin chants the speed limits in steadily increasing volume.

"Too bad we didn't go up to North Shore," Kono says as she careens around a station wagon with a stack of bicycles strapped to the roof. "Gotta bring my board next time."

"_Fifty-five_," Chin grits out.

When she pulls into his driveway he fumbles at his door handle with a breath that sounds dangerously close to relief, then pauses. "Kono," he drawls, but she's already out of the car and bounding up his steps to where Danny and Steve are propped against an ice chest with a sweating six pack half empty between them. She catches Danny in a hug, tumbling into his lap, and takes a beer from Steve.

"It's hardly five o'clock," Chin says, coming up behind her.

Steve holds up a small mesh sack with two long handled rackets and a half-squished birdie. "Danny's never played badminton." Kono takes a long draught of her beer and sighs happily. She rests her head on Danny's shoulder.

"I went swimming," she mumbles. Danny takes her beer away from her, teasing, and she socks him in the shoulder.

"Burgers and dogs in the cooler," Steve says, and Chin grabs the other side to help him haul it through the gate into the backyard.

Danny links their arms together and catches the little mesh bag off the ground. "You know," Kono says, "that's not going to fly right if it's all flattened."

Danny does a tiny jump of frustrated justification. "I _told_ him so. But will Steven listen to reason?" He continues to grumble, and Kono casts her hearing out to Steve asking Chin where he keeps the charcoal and the lighter fluid, and Chin's rumbling answer.

_Ohana_, Kono thinks, and she knows exactly what time it is, ticking along to the beat of their hearts.


End file.
